The Art of Existence
by PikaCheeka
Summary: A father long dead, a conversation long past, a question long unanswered....Who knew a Death Eater could teach his son Philosiphy, no matter how dark and disturbing?


Note* One may ask WHY I am re-uploading this

Note* One may ask WHY I am re-uploading this. The reason is simply and stupid. There was a quote I wanted to stick in, and completely forgot about it until about now...Don't bother reading this again if you have already, it's just one little thing, but it's going to bother me. One may not think it first at first, but it's pure IRONY. There will always be memories, but there never was tears.

A/N- This is a very very strange PWP...the idea randomly came to me and I just couldn't drop it, so what the heck, here it is. 

I've noticed that ever since Draco...*entered my head?* and I've been talking to him....I've realized how deep and scary hid mind really is. @_@ That's why the last few Draco-fics I've done are a heck of a lot darker [but not exactly better] than my others. 

Summary- A father long dead, a conversation long past, a question long unanswered.

Great summary, eh? ^-^. Since it's so short and meaningless, I couldn't do a good one. I suppose this could be considered philosophical and self-discovering angst.

Note* The parts in italics are flashbacks...the normal type is, uh, normal time?

Note 2* This fic scares me. ^_^; It's EXTREMELY dark, but not in an evil fashion, just in a ...disturbing way....Rating for angst, suicide/homicide themes [DRACO! DROP THAT KNIFE!]...one swear.

The Art of Existence 

By PikaCheeka

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No more memories

No more silent tears

No more gazing upon the wasted years

Help me say goodbye

~Christine, Phantom of the Opera ^_^;

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My father's in the next room trying to discover the art of existence. He'll never find it.

I've been looking back upon those years as of late, those years before I was a teenager, when I was still an idiot child, someone who was too stupid to understand the importance of a father, someone who was too stupid to even care about anything or anyone but himself. He's dead now. Been dead for seven years now. My father has.

Not that it matters.

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I'm going to ask him, I tell myself over and over. I'm going to ask him why he wastes so much of his life trying to do this. Discover the art of existence. He'll never find it. He just doesn't understand that he's already existing. 

Now that I think about it, it was not only he who 'wasted his time'. It was I. And it only was I. For he wasted nothing but his love for me, which I never cared a damn about.

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He's still sitting there. I can't wait any longer. It's been two years since I asked him what he did in his study, and I never understood it. I never cared until now. I'm twelve now, almost a teenager. I have the right to know why my father is insane.

He wasn't insane. He just understood more than what I still claim to be humanly possible. How did he know so much, and yet I so little? Why was it that so long ago I blamed everything on him, my insane father? 

He's gone now. And now I understand. But it's too late.

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"What are you doing?" I snapped, glaring at him. He looked like me. Morerather, I like him. Exact image. Humiliating.

"I've told you." He said calmly.

"You lied. Many things are arts, but not existence."

"Everything is an art."

"Existence isn't."

"It is. And it's the one that is the hardest to master."

If he had said that to me now instead of so long ago, I would have asked about the art of finding the meaning of life. But I never knew. I never knew that was the art of existence as well.

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"Stop being stupid!" I exploded. "Everyone's alive! We all 'mastered' it."

"So you believe life and existence are the same thing?" he leaned forward, his gray eyes glowing, excitement. Why is he never excited until he is coming upon something? Why does he never look at his own son that way?

I know why now, but it's too late to apologize. It's too late to understand. Everything is gone.

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"They are." I scowled, edging away. He scared me, truth to tell. He always had. He was a genius, and he didn't even need a wand to kill someone. _He didn't even have to SAY anything, just think it. And there was death everywhere. All in the mind._

"Then tell me, my son..."

I hate it when he calls me that. I didn't want to be his son. I hated him.

Bitter. I was a bitter child. I hated everything, everyone, even myself. Yet I was the only one I cared about, the only one the bigoted mind of mine turned to. Smash the mirror, laugh at it, then turn and smash in the face of an innocent bystander. Get in trouble and back my way out with lies. For myself? Yes. For the fear of my father, who would rather die than hurt me? Never mind.

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"If life and existence are the same thing...then why is it when a man is alive, he exists, but when a man is dead, he still exists?"

"He doesn't." I shuddered. What made him THINK like that? Not even his master. Master Dark Lord. LORD Voldemort. Not even he could twist someone so.

"But his body is still there. His mind is still there."

"It is NOT."

"No, his soul is gone, but his mind is there."

"What. What about extinct beings? Do they still exist?" I mumbled after a moment.

"Yes. In the air, in the ground. Their bodies return and give to the earth what they once took."

I stopped. He stopped. I stared. He shrugged.

I was just a stupid boy to him. Someone who couldn't understand. I never did understand. I only started to last night, as I stood outside on the roof in his favorite spot, the spot where he would stand and stare out over the horizon, trying to find answers that weren't there. Trying to find love in a son....a son that hated him so he was barely a son. Barely a human. Barely existing.

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He didn't talk for a few minutes, just swiveled his chair and fingered the skull of a cat. There was a bullet hole in it's head. His own father had used a weapon he himself found pathetic and shot his son's pet for no reason other than hatred. He had never done anything like that to me. Then why did I hate...when he did not?

He knew what I was thinking. He turned to me suddenly, smiling, flashing those fangs he cherished so much. Something inherited from his father. Other than the silver-blonde hair, the slenderness, the tallness, the paleness, the pointiness, the intense look of constant pain and suffering deep within his eyes.

Everything I had from him. We were exactly the same. Images. No different. Except...except I was loved. I was. He wasn't. His father hated him, beat him, tormented him. And then my father killed him. And as he grew up, he told himself again and again that he would not be the same, that he would have a son. And love him. And the son would love back.

He was wrong. I hated him, loathed him, despised him, even thought about killing him when he had never done a think to harm me. Except love me.

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"Now do you understand? Existence is being here on this earth. Being put here. Why were we put here? Why was I? Why were you?"

"You're looking for the meaning of life." I said blatantly. He was being an idiot. No one would ever find that.

"NO! What is it? What is this...thing we call LIFE? What is EXISTENCE? What combines them, blends them?" he jumped up, out of his seat, and flung one hand toward the ceiling. Forty feet above his head.

I jumped back. I was scared then, more than I had been in a long time. I had been sent home the day before because I had been injured, and he just pulled me out of school. Just like that. He was scared for me. He knew people hated me, and he knew that by sitting in the infirmary, the idiot nurse would people in to see me and hurt me more.

It scared me. It still scares me. How much he knew. He knew everything it seemed. Everything about me, and I knew so little about him. Now that I think of it, I wonder...was it because he cared about me? Most likely. That was how it always was. And I was too concerned with myself to even think about him. He was a tool. He gave me money, a home, food. Nothing more. 

Love used to be a swear for me. Perhaps it still is. For now that he is gone I am alone. Again. No. I was never alone. I simply thought I was. But he was always there. I just never realized. Now I am truly alone.

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"This art..." I smirked, my mind intent on tripping him up. "Why do you care so much? What is this stupid art of existence? We're here, alive. That's all that matters."

He frowned, pain in his eyes. 

I never noticed that. I never knew...I never thought about that other....feeling in his eyes. I assumed it was hatred. I wanted it to be hatred. I wanted a reason to want him to die. 

And now he's dead. Dead and gone. Seven years. He died when I was sixteen, before I had a chance to love him. If I ever would have taken that chance.

I wouldn't have.

I look back upon my life and struggle, try to find a small bit of love I gave him. Something, anything, but that space between us, the bridge connecting me to him...was a hollow and empty void. A void that merely swallowed whatever he gave me.

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"Well?" I pressed, leaning over his desk. I was in black, as he was, as always. Trenchcoat and all. People who wear black aren't supposed to think about stupid things like he does.

"What does it matter to you?" he muttered. 

I was taken aback. "What?" I snapped. I was terrified of him, yet at that moment I could feel the power surging from me, slicing into him.

"What does it matter to you?" he stood up, eyes blazing. He was in power again. Twenty-six years older, nine inches taller, forty pounds heavier. The master of the house until his death. Then I would be Master.

I am master now. And for the life and death of me, I see nothing grand. This entire house is mine alone, all forty floors. A mansion, a manor, a castle. A dungeon. Master Malfoy. The name means nothing. It never will. My life was ruined the first words I ever spoke, the first time I ever said I hated him.

I sealed my doom when I was barely five.

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"The point of our existence....is to love." He turned away the moment he said it, suddenly intent on the sky outside.

I half-fainted then.

I had always been weak, deathly weak. Until I was six I spent most of my life in the hospital, being born less than three pounds. I still spend a lot of time there. People love it. People love throwing Draco down the stairs and watching him collapse. People also hate when I get back at them.

I am physically weak. I was anyway. But my vampiric blood grew inside of me, and now I am more powerful than a man thrice my weight of 114 pounds. And my mind. My mind.......

It scares me. I have my father's mind. 

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I think he woke me up. For truly three minutes later I was awake, a crumpled heap in his chair, my eyes several inches from this book on his desk. Something about philosophy. He was a genius. Nobody else I knew ever even dared to think about it.

He was pacing. Pacing. Pacing his life away. Wasting his life away with me. His son who hated him. I glanced at him, then remembered what he had said and turned away in disgust again.

Why did I do that? I live for nothing now. Nothing at all. My life is hollow, careening between thoughts of suicide and wanting myself to suffer by living. 

His love for me was all that kept him alive. And now it's all that's keeping me alive. Except it's dying now.

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"Am I really...?" he stopped there and cocked his head at me. Me. I was looking at myself. 

"Really what?" I snapped, sitting up, fighting back the nausea I always felt after fainting. "What are you really?"

"Why am I a Death eater?" he suddenly shouted, whirling toward the window and raising his hand as if to shatter it.

I instinctively jumped up. He had smashed windows before. Pain. He loved it. I love it.

Death. 

Death. Friend or enemy? Friend to the hating. Enemy to the loving.

It is my friend. My very best friend. My only friend as well.

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"Because you wanted to be..."

"I did not want to be! I had to be! I had nowhere else to go! It was either Voldemort who promised me a father-figure or death which I would have bought upon myself!" he was shaking, no, vibrating with rage.

"Because you needed someone to love." I scowled, realizing what he was getting at. "So that is all. How can you still love if it ruined your life so?"

He didn't answer. He didn't answer.

I had defeated him.

And now he has defeated me.

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"Draco?" he said sadly, ever so sadly.

"What?" I crossed my arms and laughed. 

"Why do you hate?" 

I don't know, Father. I still don't know. I'll never know....

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My father's in the next room trying to discover the art of existence.

Now I sit here. I am sitting in this room trying to understand it. And I know. All I want left of my life is death. Everything else I've done was wrong, all wrong. I missed everything. I miss my father. 

Death. Love is death.

I do not love. Yet I do not exist. I am dead...

Was that what he was searching for as well?

You left me. You abandoned me for love.

Father, I found it! Father...I loved you...


End file.
